The ace Iranian filmmaker’s next is set in Spain and deals with the lives of winemakers.

After a Parisian adventure with The Past, Iranian auteur Asghar Farhadi is all set to begin a Spanish saga with a new movie. He will begin work hopefully with the country’s most celebrated acting couple, Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem.

Farhadi -- whose The Salesman won the Best Script Palm and the Best Actor Palm (for Shahab Hosseini) at Cannes 2016 -- has had a meteoric rise with movies like A Separation winning the Best Oscar for Foreign Language Picture and The Past that clinched a Golden Globe nod and an acting prize at Cannes for Berenice Bejo.

Farhadi -- who will be in Spain during the next few weeks to scout for locations -- is not yet telling us what the story of his new movie will be. But we do know that it revolves around a family of winemakers living in Spain. “It’s a psychological thriller with a dash of Agatha Christie in it” as Farhadi said at Cannes. The film will be in Spanish.

Farhadi strays into Michael Haneke’s territory with The Salesman.
(Cannes Film Festival)

The Past was largely in French, unlike his A Separation and The Salesman, which were in Persian or Farsi.

Farhadi strays into Michael Haneke’s territory with The Salesman, where a couple’s misfortunes threaten the basis of their marital relationship. Certainly, not in the class of A Separation, The Salesman traces the lives of a schoolteacher, Emad (Shahab Hosseini) and his wife Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti). When they move into a new flat, whose earlier occupant was a prostitute, the couple find themselves in a mess, when a stranger walks into their home and watches Rana in the shower -- in a case of mistaken identity.